If you are a Capitol Hill watcher, eventually you may find yourself wondering: what makes one set of small businesses more important than another?

And, like so many other things in this life, the answer to that question depends on your point of view.

If you look at them in the context of the current economic downturn or if you just believe the most valuable thing about small businesses is the jobs they generate, then the important ones are the employer firms that are most likely to create jobs.

On the other hand, if you were concerned about all the displaced workers whose jobs, we are told, won't be back, then you may be very interested in recent trends among nonemployer firms and the self-employed in general.

If you are a traditionalist, then you are probably most concerned about small businesses that are launched and grown along the traditional small business to large business trajectory. If you are interested in the federal marketplace, no doubt you care about small firms that are (or want to be) federal contractors.

As you can see, there are any number of reasons to decide that one or another set of small businesses (or even microbusinesses) matter more than all the others.

Unfortunately, all these ways of looking at the big picture are much too narrow and parochial to do justice to the nation's small businesses. And, perhaps much more to the point, they are so focused on that big picture that they fail to see that, when it comes to small business, the small picture is just as valid.

In short, it's not about which set of small businesses is more important than all the others. You can crunch the numbers and look at the economics all you like but that doesn't tell the story. The bottom line is that every single small business represents people lives.

A person owns that business and they use the money they make from it to support a family (or some reasonable facsimile). They use the money they make from it to pay the salaries of their employees, who use that money to support their own families in their turn.

There are no unimportant small businesses.

It may feel as if many of us — perhaps most of us — are pretty insignificant, particularly when looked at in terms of national allocation of resources. But we're not.

Not a single one of us.